Ancient World Review

Merry Yule, Saturnalia & (Maybe) Mithra's Birthday

Today is "Christmas," whatever that means. The word comes from the Middle English Christemasse, which is turn comes from the Old English Christes-messe or "Christ's Mass," but it's unclear what the word "mass" actually means here. These days it usually refers to the Eucharist (Holy Communion) and the Catholic mass, but it may have had a different meaning when the first Christmas was celebrated in Rome in 336 AD:

"The English noun mass is derived from Middle Latin missa. The Latin word was adopted in Old English as mæsse (via a Vulgar Latin form messa), and was sometimes glossed as sendnes (i.e. 'a sending, dismission'). The Latin term missa itself was in use by the 6th century. It is most likely derived from the concluding formula Ite, missa est ('Go; the dismissal is made'); missa here is a Late Latin substantive corresponding to classical missio." (Wikipedia)

If this is correct, the word "Christmas" means something more like "Christ's Dismissal" or "Christ's Sending," which may refer to the dismissal or "sending out into the world" of the congregation after the service. Various other explanations have been proposed, but the original meaning of "Christmas" -- like the origin of Christianity itself -- is still kind of hazy.

One thing that isn't hazy is why we celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25 (Gregorian Calendar) even though nobody has the slightest idea when Jesus was born. The date was first adopted by the Western Christian Church, sometime during the first half of the fourth century, because the early church needed to compete with  important pagan festivals like the celebration of the winter solstice.

Christmas is a classic example of how the early church Christianized the pagan West by taking over its traditions.

"The Christian ecclesiastical calendar contains many remnants of pre-Christian festivals. Christmas includes elements of the Roman feast of the Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra. The Chronography of 354 AD contains early evidence of the celebration on December 25 of a Christian liturgical feast of the birth of Jesus. This was in Rome, while in Eastern Christianity the birth of Jesus was already celebrated in connection with the Epiphany on January 6." Source: Wikipedia.

Christmas traditions have deep roots in the ancient pagan world. Take the Christmas tree, for instance. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands to symbolize eternal life was a custom of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship was common among the pagan Europeans and survived their conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian customs of decorating the house and barn with evergreens at the New Year to scare away the Devil and of setting up a tree for the birds during Christmastime. It survived further in the custom, also observed in Germany, of placing a Yule (1) tree at an entrance or inside the house during the midwinter holidays."

(1) "Yule or Yuletide ('Yule time' or 'Yule season') is a festival historically observed by the Germanic peoples. Scholars have connected the original celebrations of Yule to the Wild Hunt, the god Odin, and the pagan Anglo-Saxon Mōdraniht [Old English 'Night of the Mothers']. ." (Wikipedia)

"Later departing from its pagan roots, Yule underwent Christianised reformulation, resulting in the term Christmastide. Many present-day Christmas customs and traditions such as the Yule log, Yule goat [see next video], Yule boar, Yule singing, and others stem from pagan Yule traditions."

 Also see The Symbols of Yule.

In Rome, the period of the winter solstice brought the seven days of the Saturnalia. "Saturn’s great festival, the Saturnalia, became the most popular of Roman festivals, and its influence is still felt in the celebration of Christmas and the Western world’s New Year." (Encyclopedia Britannica).

"The Saturnalia was the most popular holiday of the Roman year,"  according to the University of Chicago. Catullus describes it as 'the best of days' ... and Seneca complains that the 'whole mob has let itself go in pleasures" ... Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while the rest of the household celebrated ... It was an occasion for celebration, visits to friends, and the presentation of gifts, particularly wax candles ... perhaps to signify the returning light after the solstice, and sigillaria [figurines given as traditional presents]."

Everything in Rome came to a stop during the Saturnalia, a festival of licentiousness and role reversals, among other things. According to History Extra, "We say that during Christmas today the whole world shuts down – the same thing happened during the Saturnalia. There were sometimes plots to overthrow the government, because people were distracted – the famous conspirator Cataline had planned to murder the Senate and set the city on fire during the holiday, but his plan was uncovered and stopped by Cicero in 63 BC."

Some Christians see the Saturnalia (and, by extension, Christmas itself) as satanic, which isn't too surprising since Christianity demonized all of the old pagan gods while simultaneously hijacking many of their traditions for their own purposes. In one case, that of Mithra (Mithras) -- the early church's main competitor -- the Christians may have appropriated a pagan god so completely that some have argued that Christ is Mithra in another form.

The identification of Mithra's birthday with Christmas is sketchy. While many sources claim that the god was born on Dec. 25, other sources say that this isn't true and the story seems to be a much later invention. According to Wikipedia, for instance, "It is often stated that Mithras was thought to have been born on December 25. But Beck states that this is not the case. In fact he calls this assertion 'that hoariest of 'facts'. He continues: 'In truth, the only evidence for it is the celebration of the birthday of Invictus on that date in the Calendar of Philocalus. Invictus is of course Sol Invictus, Aurelian's sun god. It does not follow that a different, earlier, and unofficial sun god, Sol Invictus Mithras, was necessarily or even probably, born on that day too.'" 

Mithra was said to have been born from a rock (in one version of the story) According to The Mysteries of Mithra, by Franz Cumont (p 131), "the tradition ran that the 'Generative Rock,' of which a standing image was worshiped in the temples, had given birth to Mithra on the banks of a river, under the shade of a sacred tree, and that shepherds alone, ensconced in a neighboring mountain, had witnessed the miracle of his entrance into the world." Like the story of Jesus's birth, the presence of shepherds in the fields suggests that Mithra was born in the spring or summer, not in the dead of winter. Whatever the case, however, the Jesus/Mithra connection is persistent in popular culture:

Related: Sol Invictus and Christmas

One interesting fact about Mithraism is that it appeared in the Roman Empire around the same time that Christianity appeared and seems to have dropped out of sight around the same time that Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of Rome:

"The Roman deity Mithras appears in the historical record in the late 1st century A.D., and disappears from it in the late 4th century A.D.," according to The Tertullian Project. It's tempting to see this as circumstantial evidence that Christianity evolved out of Mithraism, but the truth is that all forms of pagan religion began to fade out after the church consolidated its power in the 4th century. Besides, very little is actually known about the teachings of Mithraism, an "organization of cells," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), whose beliefs have to be reconstructed mostly from inscriptions.

None of this really matters, though. Mithras probably wasn't born on Dec. 25, but then neither was Jesus so what difference does it make? The connections between Christmas, ancient Yuletide celebrations and the Roman Saturnalia are clear, so if you're a pagan you might as well go ahead and celebrate Mithra's birthday today as well. Of course, this assumes that you see Christmas as a religious holiday in the first place. A lot of people don't:

"Most Americans celebrate Christmas, but its importance to people as a religious event continues to wane, according to a new survey by Pew Research." (News & Observer, 2017). Note: this article is now hidden behind a paywall.

"The poll found that while 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, only 55 percent regard it as a religious holiday. Further, the survey found, a decreasing majority of Americans believe in the main elements of the Christmas story as told in the Bible: that Jesus was born of a virgin mother; that three magi came to visit, bearing gifts; that an angel announced the baby’s birth; and that the infant was cradled in a manger."

Christmas has become secularized and increasingly commercial, to say the least. The holiday has degenerated into a month-long orgy of rabid consumerism and mass insanity, a typical example of the decline of the modern world. (Next video from 2018)

I have mixed feelings about Christmas. I'm an atheist, I don't believe that Jesus existed and I think that Christianity was a disaster for the Roman Empire and the West in general, but I'm not one of those rabid anti-Christians who protest manger displays and fly into shrieking tantrums every time someone says "Merry Christmas." And while it's obvious that the early (Western) church made Dec. 25 Jesus's birthday in order to hijack a pagan festival, I'm not especially bothered by that fact. I don't get all offended about it and start foaming at the mouth.

I can't stand what Christmas has become, but the holiday is a Western tradition so even though I'm a complete heretic I support the open celebration of the holiday because the West and all of its values and institutions and traditions are under attack by politically-correct vermin. I'd rather see a return to our true pagan roots (something I don't think is possible, by the way), but given the choice between Christianity and, say, Islam or Cultural Marxism or, God forbid, modern neopaganism, I'll take Christianity any day even though I don't believe a word of it.

So Merry Christmas and if saying that offends somebody I couldn't care less.

Mary, The Christian Demi-Goddess

"Mary, as the mother of Jesus, is documented in Roman catacombs: paintings from the first half of the 2nd century show her holding the Christ Child. Excavations in the crypt of St Peter's Basilica uncovered a very early fresco of Mary together with Saint Peter. The Roman Priscilla catacombs depict the oldest Marian paintings from the middle of the 2nd century: Mary is shown with Jesus on her lap; they are next to a man in a tunic, his left hand holding a book and his right hand pointing to a star over his head, the latter being an Old Testament symbol of messiahs and/or the Messiah." Source: Wikipedia.

The transformation of Mary into a Christian demi-goddess or minor deity seems to have started with the apocryphal Gospel of James, aka The Proto-Gospel or Protoevangelium of James. Thought to have been written sometime during the 2nd century AD, "It tells of the virginal conception of the Virgin Mary, her upbringing and marriage to Joseph, the journey of the holy couple to Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, and events immediately following. It is the earliest surviving assertion of the perpetual virginity of Mary, meaning her virginity not just prior to the birth of Jesus, but during and afterwards, while defending Jesus against pagan and Jewish accusations of illegitimacy." (Wikipedia)

Jesus' miraculous birth or Immaculate Conception was a common theme in ancient mythology, but the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity leads to various theological difficulties for the Christians who believe in it. According to the New Testament, Jesus had four brothers: James, Joseph (Joses), Judas (Jude), and Simon. (Jesus apparently had sisters as well, but they're not named.) If Mary was indeed a perpetual virgin, this obviously means that all of Jesus' siblings were also sons and daughters of a virgin, so there wasn't anything special about Jesus in this regard. To get around this problem, believers in Mary's perpetual virginity end up having to argue that Jesus didn't have any biological sisters and brothers at all. They all just kind of grew up together or something.

Mary is venerated by Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches. According to Wikipedia, "this veneration especially takes the form of prayer for intercession with her Son, Jesus Christ." This makes Mary a kind of intermediate deity who along with the other saints and angels can intercede in God's divine council. Mary has considerable powers in her own right, however. She can perform miracles, heal the sick, etc., and when she died, God raised her body into heaven, according to Catholic and Eastern Christian teachings. In another version of this story, she never died at all but was assumed directly into heaven while still alive. The exact nature of her assumption is a matter of theological debate:

"Many Catholics believe that Mary first died before being assumed, but they believe that she was miraculously resurrected before being assumed. Others believe she was assumed bodily into Heaven without first dying. Either understanding may be legitimately held by Catholics, with Eastern Catholics observing the Feast as the Dormition." (Wikipedia)

Note: The Dormition is an Eastern festival which "commemorates the 'falling asleep' or death of Mary the Theotokos ('Mother of God', literally translated as God-bearer), and her bodily resurrection before being taken up into heaven."

There are a couple of problems here. For instance, if Mary is the "mother of God," then who got her pregnant in the first place? And if the Son and the Father are "one substance, essence or nature" did the Son in the form of the Father come down to Mary and give birth to himself? (The doctrine of the Trinity has never made any sense to me).

According to early sources, Mary was what we would now call a child bride:

"Some apocryphal accounts state that at the time of her betrothal to Joseph, Mary was 12–14 years old. According to ancient Jewish custom, Mary could have been betrothed at about 12. Hyppolitus of Thebes says that Mary lived for 11 years after the death of her son Jesus, dying in 41 AD." (Wikipedia)

^"The earliest extant biographical writing on Mary is Life of the Virgin attributed to the 7th-century saint, Maximus the Confessor, which portrays her as a key element of the early Christian Church after the death of Jesus."

The details of Mary's life are sketchy. So is the date of her death (if it actually occurred) and her resurrection. These are all details, however. The real question is whether she actually existed.

Note Dame Cathedral Being Turned Into "Woke Theme Park?"

"Fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral is being turned into a 'woke theme park' with renovators adding a 'discovery trail' and 'Christianity for dummies' exhibits, critics have claimed." Source: Daily Mail.

"Under new plans, confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures will be scrapped for trendy art murals, with sound and lighting effects creating 'emotional spaces.'

"A 'discovery trail' will lead visitors through various chapels, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia, and scripture will be beamed onto the walls in various languages, including Mandarin. One of the sanctuaries will even be dedicated to the environment.

"Maurice Culot, an award-winning Paris-based architect, told The Telegraph: 'It's as if Disney were entering Notre-Dame.

"'What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame would never be done to Westminster Abbey or Saint Peter's in Rome. It's a kind of theme park and very childish and trivial given the grandeur of the place.'" 

Comment: As far as I can tell, these idiotic plans are just proposals being floated by woke morons like the ones who originally wanted to rebuild the cathedral with a glass roof, steel spire or Islamic minaret. According to the Daily Mail, "The majority of the members of the scientific committee overlooking the restoration are not keen on the plans, but General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who Macron has tasked with leading the restoration, and the Paris Archbishop want to press ahead." The decision will apparently be made next month, so let's hope that sanity prevails. If it doesn't -- if they actually go through with this atrocity -- then it would probably be better to just burn the cathedral to the ground.

Next video shows the state of the restoration as of July, 2021.

Letter From Guyuk Khan To Pope Innocent IV

A primary source reading from the great Voices of the Past channel.

Guyuk Khan (1206 - 1248 AD), a grandson of Genghis Khan, became the third Khagan-emperor of the Mongol Empire in 1246. His rule over the largest contiguous land empire in history only lasted two years, but he had grand ambitions:

"When the papal envoy John of Plano Carpini protested Mongol attacks on the Catholic kingdoms of Europe, Güyük stated that these people had slain Mongol envoys in the time of Genghis Khan and Ogedei Khan. He also claimed that 'from the rising of the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to the Great Khan', proclaiming an explicit ideology of world conquest. The Khagan wrote a letter to Pope Innocent IV on the relations between the Church and the Mongols. 'You must say with a sincere heart: "We will be your subjects; we will give you our strength". You must in person come with your kings, all together, without exception, to render us service and pay us homage. Only then will we acknowledge your submission. And if you do not follow the order of God, and go against our orders, we will know you as our enemy.'" (Wikipedia)

Guyuk Khan didn't have the strength (or the time, perhaps) to force the pope into submission, but he didn't stop killing Christians, either.

Note: In 1219, Guyuk Khan's grandfather, Genghis Khan, wrote a very different kind of letter to a famous Taoist monk named Qiu Chuji, asking him to visit the Mongol court so the great but aging Khan could learn the secret of immortality. The story of Qiu Chuji's travels to meet the Khan is interesting reading.

A Brief History Of Hell (Updated)

The myth of Hell can be traced all the way back to the first civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, but I'm guessing that the concept of an "underworld of the dead" had its origins in the earliest funerary religions of the Stone Age. The dead were buried under the earth, so the land of the dead was also seen as being somewhere underground.

Hell wasn't called Hell in Mesopotamia and it wasn't a place of punishment for sinners. That's a much more modern idea. Originally, the place we call Hell was just a grim vision of the afterlife waiting for everyone. In other words, back around 3,000 BC or so, everybody went to "Hell" so I guess you could say that Hell was the original Heaven:

"The Sumerian afterlife was a dark, dreary cavern located deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue ^'a shadowy version of life on earth^'. This bleak domain was known as Kur, and was believed to be ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal. All souls went to the same afterlife, and a person's actions during life had no effect on how the person would be treated in the world to come." Source: Wikipedia.

Closed-captions helpful. Sort of.

The Old Testament Sheol, also known as Hades, is basically identical to the Mesopotamian Kur. According to Wikipedia, "Sheol is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God."

The concept of an underworld where sinners are punished after death seems to have evolved in ancient Egypt and Greece, but several different versions of the myth were floating around the Near East and Mediterranean world back then.

The Greeks, for instance, had a concept of the underworld (Hades) as a "deep, gloomy place" where everyone went after death, but the element of judgment was also present in their mythology. " In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BC) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus," a pit or cave in Hades that was used as a dungeon. (Wikipedia) "Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans."

The next clip is from the great 1997 miniseries, The Odyssey, with Armand Assante (highly recommended). It starts off with the scene where Odysseus travels to Hades to ask the blind prophet Tiresias how to get home. The Hades in this scene is more of an underworld of shades than a place of divine punishment.

Hades was not only a place, but the name of the god of the underworld. Originally, he appears to have been one of many anonymous chthonic deities and it was dangerous to mention his actual name:

"...Hades lacked a proper name; as in the case of other nameless chthonians, his anonymity was a precaution. He was referred to by descriptive circumlocutions as 'chthonian Zeus' ... 'the chthonian god,' 'king of those below,' 'Zeus of the departed' ... 'the other Zeus,' 'the god below,' or simply 'lord.' As the Lord of the Dead, he was dark and sinister, a god to be feared and kept at a distance." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).

The history of Hell and its demons is too long and complex to describe in detail here, but our modern concept of Hell apparently originated with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity. From what I've read, Judaism sees Hell as a state of shame and atonement rather than a physical place. The full-blown description of Hell as a literal pit of fire and brimstone and eternal torment seems to be an invention of the medieval Christian church. 

Interestingly enough, "[t]he Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew word Gehinnom (1)." So the Hell of the New Testament has clear roots in the underworld of the dead as described by the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians.

(1) The word Gehinnom derives from Gehenna, a reference to the "Valley of Hinnom," a garbage dump outside of Jersualem where people burned their trash. According to Wikipedia, "[b]odies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed. Gehenna is used in the New Testament as a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection."

The valley is said to be cursed because some of the early kings of Judah sacrificed children to Moloch there.

These days, a majority of Americans still believe in Hell and a 2007 Harris poll revealed that more Americans believe in a literal Hell and Devil than they do in the theory of evolution. Some Christian denominations reject the concept of Hell altogether, while others still embrace the literal version of Hell famously described by Jonathan Edwards in his notorious 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

The full text of this sermon is a classic well worth reading.

Back in 2018, Pope Francis created a storm of controversy when he supposedly said that Hell doesn't exist and that condemned souls just disappear, though it's possible that his actual words were misreported. If Francis doesn't believe in Hell, he apparently still believes in demons, however, because the Vatican announced in the same year that it would hold a "training course for priests in exorcism ... amid claims that demands for deliverance from demonic possession have greatly increased across the world."

Manuscript Exposes Religious Beliefs & Cults In Medieval England

The prayer roll described in this Archaeology News Network article was associated with the Bromholm Priory.

"A rare English illuminated medieval prayer roll, believed to be among only a few dozen still in existence worldwide, has been analysed in a new study to expose Catholic beliefs in England before the Reformation in the sixteenth century." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"Now in private hands and previously unknown to experts, this metre-long roll provides fresh insights into Christian pilgrimage, and the cult of the Cross before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries."

Original paper: An Early-16th-Century Prayer Roll and the Holy Rood of Bromholm, Gail Turner, Journal of the British Archaeological Association.

 

Rare Manuscript Guide To Hunting Witches

Video from 2019. The rest of the series can be found scattered around in this playlist.

"A rare copy of the medieval manuscript Invectives Against the Sect of Waldensians, which, alongside the later published Malleus Maleficarum, detailed how to recognize, question, torture and burn witches, is possibly being resurrected at the University of Alberta. The originally mis-catalogued book is one of only four copies in the world, with the other three housed in libraries in France, Brussels, and Oxford, and is a stunning historical artifact." Source: The Malleusmaleficarum (2012).

Note: Technically, the Waldensians were proto-Protestant Christians, not witches, but the distinction didn't matter to the author of Invectives:

"The Waldensians were medieval heretics who disavowed the power of the priests and allowed women to preach. But for the author of this book, Dominican inquisitor Johannes Tinctor, 'Waldensian' was a synonym for 'witch'."

Many of the Waldensian doctrines sound perfectly reasonable, but they challenged the Catholic church's authority and suffered really horrendous persecution for centuries as a result. For instance, the massacre described in the video below "became known as the Piedmont Easter. An estimate of some 1,700 Waldensians were slaughtered; the massacre was so brutal it aroused indignation throughout Europe." (Wikipedia)

The Medieval Cult Of Relics (Updated)

Part two here. Part three here.

During the medieval period, the trade in holy relics was a lucrative and widespread racket operated by the Catholic church:

"Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe hosted a thriving trade in holy relics. But many of the relics, if not all of them, were fake." Source: The Museum of Hoaxes.

"The relics collected and worshiped by medieval Europeans ranged from the mundane to the truly bizarre. Bones or body parts of saints and martyrs were always in high demand. One church proudly displayed the brain of St. Peter until the relic was accidentally moved and revealed to be a piece of pumice stone."

Christians didn't invent the worship of relics, however. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "the practice goes back at least to the Geometric period [in Greece 900-700 BC], persisted through antiquity, and has survived within the Catholic and Orthodox churches."

Relics in ancient Greece were commonly associated with hero cults and they were certainly just as fraudulent as the medieval Christian variety. According to the OCD, "there are numerous examples of relics, which fall into three main categories: first, those put into a certain place on purpose and subsequently worshiped there; second, those brought from one place to another for worship at the latter; third, those found by chance, given an identity, and venerated."

The relics of heroes and saints were thought to be "imbued with the power to benefit their possessor." (OCD) According to A History of the Middle Ages, 300-1500, by John M. Riddle, "the [medieval] age was devoted to the cults of the saints, wherein 'numinous' power was believed to be acquired by veneration of a specific saint, mainly by touching or kissing the saint's physical relic." (p 238)

This is clear evidence that medieval Christians believed in magic and practiced a form of polytheism with the saints as a kind of pantheon of minor deities or demigods. This veneration of relics still continues today in many parts of the world, especially among Catholics, and there's no doubt that every one of these relics is a fake. Next video is a news report from 2015.

Relics were valuable in the medieval world because they attracted patronage and pilgrims, a form of tourism that could greatly increase the wealth of parishes and monasteries. Some monks enjoyed the favor of the rich and weren't above fleecing their own flocks:

"...they bilked the villagers, selling them relics of inspired imagination," according to A Distant Mirror: The Calmitous 14th Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman (p.32). For instance, one friar "sold a piece of the bush from which the Lord spoke to Moses [and] some sold drafts of the Treasury of Merit supposed to be stored in Heaven by the Order of St. Francis," which is still involved in the relic trade.

According to Nature (2007), "four Franciscan churches in central Italy claim that they each hold a habit of St Francis of Assisi, the friar who founded the Franciscan order in the early 1200s ... Every year more than three million visitors come to the major shrine of St Francis, a basilica in Assisi that hosts famous frescoes depicting the saint's life, and one of the habits said to have belonged to the saint." [Emphasis added]

When it comes to relics, the Catholic church hasn't changed much over the centuries.

I have to wonder how anyone knows that this or that piece of cloth was part of St. Francis's habit or that the bones of St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Theologian are actually their real bones. Did St. Francis have a name tag on his habit? I'm not sure what happened to St. Gregory's body, but in the case of St. John Chryostom, his remains were scattered all over the Christian world in the years following his death. His skull apparently ended up in the hands of the Russian Orthodox Church -- it's apparently still on display at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. At least, they have a skull there. Who knows who it really belonged to?

"Today, the monastery at Vatopedi posits a rival claim to possessing the skull of John Chrysostom," according to Wikipedia, "and there a skull is venerated by pilgrims to the monastery as that of St John. Two sites in Italy also claim to have the saint's skull: the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and the Dal Pozzo chapel in Pisa. The right hand of St. John is preserved on Mount Athos, and numerous smaller relics are scattered throughout the world."

Unless St. John had four heads, at least three of these skulls have to be fakes. Most likely, they all are. Wouldn't it be hilarious if these various body parts turned out to have belonged to common peasants, criminals or, better yet, notorious heretics? Some of the smaller fragments may even be animal bones for all we know, bones that now play an important role in the religious tourist trade that specializes in conning the superstitious rabble.

Video from 2019. Note the way the worshipers kiss these relics and kneel down to them as if they have occult properties. If this isn't a belief in magic, I don't know what is.

Holy relics fall into various classes. First-class relics consist of the actual body parts of saints. Second-class relics are items of clothing or other objects used by the saint, while third-class relics are objects which have touched first-class relics, thereby absorbing some of their magical power. Dividing relics into classes like this makes it possible to create hundreds, if not thousands of new relics. In the case of the supposed crown of thorns, for instance, many of the "holy thorns" attached to the crown qualify as third-class relics while others are apparently first-class relics. All of these various bits and pieces of the crown could be scattered around different churches in order to attract tourists.

This kind of system led to a wild proliferation of relics. Any thorn could be presented as part of the crown of thorns, just as a common nail, suitably aged, could be said to have been used in the crucifixion. Back in the Middle Ages the church wasn't above calling rocks and random bone fragments part of a saint's skeleton, and the faithful would line up to venerate them, make donations to the church and spend money in the local community.

This lucrative racket went on for centuries and it's still thriving today. And why not? The authenticity of these relics can't be determined in any case. There's absolutely no way to prove that the crown of thorns on display at Notre Dame is the "real" crown of thorns, but it doesn't matter. The faithful will apparently believe almost anything is a "holy relic" if it's put on display in a golden case and surrounded with enough solemn ritualism.

"Historic" Vatican Corruption Trial In Progress

Report from July 27, 2021.

Last month a Vatican corruption trial began which was described at the time as "historic." The corruption here was supposedly so egregious and high-reaching that Pope Francis himself took a break from cracking down on the Latin Mass and calling for more immigration to make sure that the trial proceeded.

The case sounds like something out of a Richard Condon novel. According to Crux Now, "The list of those being tried by the Vatican criminal court include a once powerful cardinal, an alleged intelligence analyst who used Vatican money to buy high-end handbags. and the man once tasked with putting the Vatican on Europe’s 'white list' for financial propriety."

Report from July 27, 2021.

"This will be the first time that the Vatican tribunal, made up of lay magistrates, will carry out a criminal trial against a cardinal of the Curia – the central government of the Catholic Church. The allegations against the defendants include misappropriation of funds, extortion, embezzlement, fraud to money laundering, abuse of office and violation of official secrecy."

Comment: I'm not familiar with this case -- I just read about it a few seconds ago -- but I assume that the cardinal and the other defendants are all guilty as hell. As an impartial observer, I've always thought that extortion, fraud, embezzlement, abuse of office, murder, racketeering and sexual degeneracy are SOP at the Vatican. Like all other governments, the Holy See has its own criminal Deep State. The only difference in this case is that some of the criminals wear robes and weird hats (at least on ceremonial occasions) instead of Armani suits.

July 27, 2021.

This trial is supposedly a big deal because it's the first time the Vatican has brought charges against such a high-ranking cardinal:

"Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who served as chief of staff in the Vatican’s secretariat of state, is the highest-placed Vatican figure to face a trial for alleged financial crimes. At the trial that started on Tuesday, the 73-year-old Becciu and two former leaders of the Vatican’s financial watchdog are among the 10 defendants who are accused of offenses including fraud, embezzlement, abuse of office, money-laundering and corruption." Source: Bloomberg (July 27, 2021).

If you believe the news coverage, Pope Francis is a reformer who has been trying to fight corruption ever since he took office. If that's true, he's going to have to do more than just put a cardinal and various apparatchiks on trial. Becciu was allegedly involved in all sorts of sketchy investments and creative accounting, at the very least, but that's routine in big finance these days. If Francis really wants to solve this problem, the only way to do it is to completely eliminate the Vatican Bank.

Report from 2015.

This trial is just the latest event in an ongoing fight to clean up the Vatican Bank which has been going on for over a decade now. The next news report, for instance, is from 2013.

There have been so many of these financial scandals at the Vatican that it's probably safe to say that the problem is systemic. The Vatican Bank isn't corrupt because of a few corrupt bank officials, though it's certainly had a lot of them. The Vatican Bank is corrupt because it's a bank. The only real solution to this kind of financial corruption, aka business as usual, is to get rid of the bank itself, but that isn't going to happen because (1) it would mean a loss of sovereignty for the Holy See itself, and (2) the Vatican would lose a big part of its revenue.

The Catholic Church is a schizophrenic institution. It's a religious organization, but it's also a big business. Historically, the church has always been corrupt to one degree or another. Its sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages is a classic example, and the Renaissance popes, eg the Borgias, have a notorious reputation. The modern church is an independent state, one of the last absolute monarchies in the world, and it has all the problems that go along with being a secular power. Pope Francis's fight against corruption is doomed because he's just replacing one set of bankers with another.

Whatever happens with this current trial, we'll see more of them in the future. You can count on that. The corruption will keep making the news until the Vatican closes its bank, loses its sovereign status or starts hiring a more discrete and efficient class of money manipulators.

The Medieval Book Of Hours

The Book of Hours is a devotional book popular with Christians in the Middle Ages. According to Wikipedia, these are the most common type of surviving illuminated manuscripts from the period:

"Like every manuscript, each manuscript book of hours is unique in one way or another, but most contain a similar collection of texts, prayers and psalms, often with appropriate decorations, for Christian devotion. Illumination or decoration is minimal in many examples, often restricted to decorated capital letters at the start of psalms and other prayers, but books made for wealthy patrons may be extremely lavish, with full-page miniatures."

These fantastic illuminated books are valuable collector's items today. "As a group, Books of Hours are arguably the most beautiful of all books," according to one source I found. "They are also some of the most expensive, with modest examples starting in five figures. One of the finest Book of Hours -- the richly illuminated Rothschild Prayerbook -- sold for a record $13.5 million (£8.6 million) in 1999."

Comment: Considering all the time, money and painstaking craftsmanship that went into creating these masterpieces, it's obvious that they weren't just simple prayer books. Books of Hours -- the more lavishly illustrated ones, at least -- are classic examples of conspicuous consumption. Back in the medieval world, they were a display of affluence, of discretionary economic power and the political influence that goes along with it. As hyper-expensive collector's items, they're still symbols of wealth, sometimes massive wealth as in the case of the Rothschild Prayer Book. This is more than a little ironic considering their content and Jesus' teachings about the "poor in spirit," but this tension between spirituality and earthly power runs all through the history of the Christian church.

These are beautiful books, works of art, but they're too safe, too harmless to be really interesting. Nobody would have gotten into trouble for owning a Book of Hours containing devotions presumably authorized by the church. I like my medieval books to be more dangerous than that. The most interesting ones were the grimoires and banned Bible translations that had to be hidden away on pain of death or banishment. Handcrafted books gave their contents a kind of magical power, especially in an age of widespread illiteracy, and the most powerful books were full of forbidden knowledge. Books are mass-produced today, but we still have forbidden books that can't be found in mainstream bookstores and have to be read more or less in secret. The public denunciations and rituals of secrecy surrounding these books give their contents an aura of dark energy that you'll never find in a mass market paperback.

Related: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts